FISAgate

The AP delivered today’s good news this morning: “Attorney General William Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was ‘lawful and appropriate,’ according to a person familiar with the issue.” I love that “person familiar with the issue.” Someone’s giving it back to the bad boys who’ve been dishing it out via the New »

I wrote about Kim Strassel’s Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch column this past Friday in “For fear of William Barr.” She followed up on Twitter with a citation of Exhibit A in support of the thesis of her column (below). Her Exhibit A, however, is an overdetermined answer to many questions at the base of which is sheer will to power. With respect to Attorney General Barr’s promised investigation of »

The Democrats’ hysteria over Attorney General William Barr is directly proportional to their fear of the damage they fear he might do, Kim Strassel explains in her Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch column here: Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins »

Attorney General Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday offered a preview of coming attractions. He means to get to the bottom of the “spying” conducted by the Obama administration on the Trump presidential campaign. How did it begin? What’s it all about? What was going on? Did it involve abuse of the FISA system? Of course, you had to tune out the Democratic static and listen to Barr’s »

Democrats cannot handle the truth. We saw this yesterday in their uniform reaction to Attorney General Barr’s acknowledgment that “Spying did occur” on the Trump presidential campaign. The link is to today’s Wall Street Journal editorial (by Kim Strassel, I am quite sure, and behind the Journal’s paywall. Somewhere near the top of this post, however, I want to quote a sentence from Mollie Hemingway’s Federalist column on the Barr »

Rep. Devin Nunes appeared on Maria Bartromo’s Sunday Morning Futures show yesterday. No one in Congress has taken more abuse than he has for his work exposing the Russia collusion hoax foisted on us by the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign. To borrow a formulation from Walt Whitman: He is the man. He suffered. He was there. We were not supposed to know. Thanks in large part to Rep. Nunes and »

Based on Attorney General Barr’s summary of the report submitted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, we know that the gravamen of Mueller’s investigation was alleged “collusion” by the Trump presidential campaign with Russian organs interfering with the election. We nevertheless have yet to see an unredacted copy of the August 2017 scope memo that set the parameters of Mueller’s investigation. It remains a deep, dark secret. The case of Carter »

Lee Smith’s Federalist essay “New Documents Suggest The Steele Dossier Was A Deliberate Setup For Trump” is only his most recent contribution to our understanding of the greatest scandal in our history — the one underlying the presidential election of 2016, from the Clinton campaign to the highest reaches of the Obama administration. Struggling to find a representative excerpt of this long essay, I am happy to glom onto this »

Who can keep up with the twists and turns of the New York Times in its opposition to all things Trump? Like the American Communists of old, the Times is prepared to turn on a dime as the needs of the party dictate. The Weekly Standard’s Eric Felten presents an intensely interesting case study in “Why Is the NYT Suddenly Opposed to Declassifying the FISA Docs?” The FISA documents in »

Devin Nunes called in to speak from the republic of Georgia to speak with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Sunday Morning Futures show this morning. The interview previews the testimony of former United States associate deputy attorney general regarding his communications with Christopher Steele after the FBI had supposedly terminated its relationship with him. John Solomon and Byron York have covered the latest revelations regarding Ohr’s involvement in the »

The cover story of the current issue of the Weekly Standard is “The Truth About Carter Page, the FBI, and Devin Nunes’ Conspiracy Theory” by one April Doss. I have contrasted Doss’s disparagement of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in this story with the profile of Nunes by Standard executive editor Fred Barnes in the same issue. I’m with Fred and against Doss. The two pieces sit uneasily in »

Maria Bartiromo had House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes on the Fox News Sunday Morning Futures show to discuss the heavily redacted FISA warrant applications that were released by the Department of Justice on July 21 in the Saturday night document dump (video below). I posted the documents here as released. Query whether the DoJ released these documents on a Saturday night because they are proud of their handiwork and »

As I have noted here a time or two before, I greatly admire the job that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has done unearthing the true story of the intelligence agencies’ “insurance” work on the 2016 election and the Democrats’ related collusion with the friends of Vladimir Putin. It is an improbable story that everyone involved has mightily sought to keep hidden from him and his colleagues. Rep. Nunes »

The release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap Carter Page triggered a debate over whether the FBI gave the FISA court judges enough information to assess the anti-Trump motives of the people behind the Steele dossier. That dossier was at the core of the FBI’s application. Defenders of the FBI point to a footnote in the FISA application with »

Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he believes there were “sound reasons” for judges to approve the FISA warrant on former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Burr denies that the FISA application filed by the Justice Department “came up short.” It seems to me that there are two distinct questions raised by the FISA application. First, did it provide sufficient basis, on its face, »

I hold with Byron York that the release of the heavily redacted FISA warrant application documents on Carter Page have vindicated Devin Nunes. By the same token, Andrew McCarthy now judges that the documents disgrace the FBI. As always, Andy knows what he is talking about. His must-read NR column is “FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier.” With the skills of a natural teacher who »

The Department of Justice released a highly redacted version of the FISA warrant applications on Carter Page in its Saturday night document dump. I posted the FISA warrant documents here. This past February House Intelligence Committee Chariman Devin Nunes released an important memo on the FISA warrant documents (embedded below). Prominent Democrats and their media adjunct defamed Nunes as a liar. After the release of the FISA warrant documents on »